The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza

Author:Cristina Rivera Garza
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781936932061
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2017-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

THE IDEA BEGAN TO TEMPT ME SOME DAYS LATER. AT FIRST IT was only a game, something like an image within an image. Then, gradually, my eyes began to transform into invisible microscopes. I looked at everything with hubris, greed, discipline. I spied on myself at every turn. Touching myself became one more way of seeing myself in the world. I am here, I said to myself. I am me. And, with the same grim diligence, I spied on others.

For example, I watched the conduct of the female nurses in the hospital and was relieved to discover that their cruelty didn’t differ in the slightest from my own. They didn’t touch the elbow of some dying man with any more or less care. In their eyes, as in mine, there was no sense of a tenderness that softened the image of the decaying bodies. I paid attention, too, to the hustle and bustle of the cooks—rough country women in whom it would perhaps be easier to identify those feminine virtues, which are supposedly innate and thus natural. Just as had happened with the nurses, though, it didn’t take me long to confirm that their roughness and vulgarity was the same as that of the guards. There was no grace, for example, in the way they maneuvered their bodies between the huge pots where they deposited, almost without looking, the spices that gave their concoctions that unclassifiable flavor. There was no dedication, sense of sacrifice, or any trace of commiseration. Those women were just as feminine as the tree I had once been.

I supposed that my observations up until then had been unfairly influenced by the nurses’ social standing as much as that of the kitchen employees, so I paid attention to the administrative workers as well. There honestly weren’t many, given that the job required training many women did not have access to, but among the secretaries, file clerks, and heads of departments I saw the same astonishing tendency toward indifference and professed maliciousness—almost militaristic—that men of similar standings possessed. None of them demonstrated any sort of singular passion for a job that, certainly, offered few opportunities for advancement. In fact, all of them spent their time sitting at their desks, tapping on their keyboards in the uniform rhythms of those who write memoranda and reports. Many of them displayed more interest in their manicures than in the spelling mistakes plaguing their official documents. There was little, I mean to say, that you’d consider purely tender, compassionate, obsequious, about those women.

And the same thing happened among our patients. At death’s door, almost within her arms, there were few things that differentiated a dying woman from a dying man. Those with a lachrymose temperament would cry, regardless of the internal and external form of their genitals. All of them dirty, equally malnourished, terminally ill, without hope or expectation, by then with a minimal connection to what is presumptuously called reality—to these patients it mattered very little whether in life they had been men or women.

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